If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

AMD Releases R600/700 Programming Guide

Phoronix: AMD Releases R600/700 Programming Guide

AMD ended out last year by releasing basic R600/700 3D code that allowed the rendering of open-source triangles, but not much in the way of usable OpenGL acceleration for end-users. Just last month AMD had then pushed out new R600/700 code that plugged into the Mesa stack and is being used as the groundwork for the providing open-source OpenGL acceleration on the Linux desktop with newer ATI graphics processors. In between December and April, AMD had also released extensive documentation covering the 3D engines on the R600 and R700 graphics processors along with the R700 instruction set architecture. While the open-source 3D support is still emerging for the Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 series, AMD has released some more documentation. This time around they have a programming guide for those developers interested in understanding the latest ATI GPUs.

radeon and radeonhd are xorg drivers, used for modesetting and 2d. Xorg uses mesa for 3d, so it doesn't matter which one you pick.

there are several branches of mesa, radeon-rewrite being one of them. bridgman has explained them several times (use the search function), but the baseline for end users is: pick whatever is announced on phoronix

radeon and radeonhd are xorg drivers, used for modesetting and 2d. Xorg uses mesa for 3d, so it doesn't matter which one you pick.

there are several branches of mesa, radeon-rewrite being one of them. bridgman has explained them several times (use the search function), but the baseline for end users is: pick whatever is announced on phoronix

Great! Thanx! I should have known that really. In my defense I am just emerging from a horrible cold and my much brain is still suspended

I am using radeon on my Thinkpad and have not tried radeonhd yet. I seem to hear less fuzz about the latter one but it is still actively developed no? Are there significant feature differences between the two in other areas such as 2D rendering, suspend/resume, xrandr and powerplay?

Lets hope this helps in finally letting die that bad reputation Ati has for their drivers. The opensource drivers provide choice for the end user to pick the best driver available. It also means that these graphics cards will be supported for a long long time (because the community has the ways to do this). And it means that Ati is the way to go for the opensource guru that hates the binary blobs, which are the only things that other manufacturer provides .

Perhaps some day AMD/Ati will be the choice for Linux because good opensource drivers are available (my personal hopes are that the catalyst drivers will get a bit better as well, so they can really get on par with nvidias drivers).

Anyway: my next graphics card (after an HD4870, an HD3450 and an integrated HD3200) will certainly be an AMD/Ati one again.

Perhaps some day AMD/Ati will be the choice for Linux because good opensource drivers are available (my personal hopes are that the catalyst drivers will get a bit better as well, so they can really get on par with nvidias drivers).

Excited as well, but I still hope fglrx dies as soon as the open drivers catch up and it's not needed anymore. That circumvents them needing to open source it if there are issues with that, and then they can focus their efforts on a much more open future for the GNU/Linux platform.

Seeing the CCC open sourced would be neat too, but again, if they don't open source it I hope they help make an open source GUI to tweak their (and other) gfx cards or simply help contribute and enhance the graphics configuration GUIs and command line programs which already exist which would probably be more ideal. Perhaps enhance xrandr or something else to do more complicated tweaks to graphics performance (like mipmaps, various frequencies, etc etc).